Clément Cogitore en

Biography

Les Indes Galantes, an opera-ballet written by Jean Philippe Rameau in 1735, was inspired by a Native American dance from Louisiana as performed by the chief of the Metchigaema in Paris in 1723. For this piece, Clément Cogitoire (FR, 1983, based in Paris) reworks a section of the ballet with a group of krump dancers – an art form born in predominantly black neighbourhoods of Los Angeles in the 1990s. Against a backdrop of police violence and riots following the murder of Rodney King, young dancers used krumping as a means to express the physical, political and social tensions they experienced. Placed together, the tribal dance of 1723 and today’s krump dancers disrupt histories of people and culture to tell a new story about young people dancing on a volcano.

Cogitore is a laureate of Paris’ Salon de Montrouge in 2011, the Prix Fondation Ricard in 2016 and the Prix Marcel Duchamp in 2018. His films have been screened at numerous festivals including Cannes, Locarno, Telluride, Los Angeles and San Sebastian. In 2017 a solo exhibition was held at le Bal, Paris. He directed a production of Les Indes Galantes in 2019 at the Opéra Bastille, Paris.